Bitter Pills
by Lin M
Summary: S10. Rachel Greene visits Elizabeth Corday, and Elizabeth gets in touch with her real self.


Spoilers                  None, unless you count Hallee Hirsh's website saying that she will be appearing in at least one ER S10 episode this spring.

Complete               Yes. 

Other                      Rap thought up the title when I couldn't. And, In Memoriam Boomtown. Hence the tribute of the style.

Disclaimer

The characters and setting of ER are the property of NBC, Warner Bros., Amblin Entertainment and Constant C Television.

**BITTER PILLS**

"For the hundredth time, I've already told you", said Elizabeth Corday.  She spread her palms out on the battered table, carefully, to avoid splinters. She looked across at the detective sitting opposite her, whose eyes looked as red as hers must also be. 

  
The detective opposite grunted, nodded and shifted in her seat. More than twenty minutes on these chairs, and your bum died. Elizabeth assumed that she still had feet, even though she'd lost feeling in them an hour or so ago. 

The detective's partner had taken up position just out of her peripheral vision, and was leaning against a wall whose chipped paint had once been bile green, and was now bile green plus tobacco smoke veneer under a faint patina of fear sweat.  He was trying to look cool, or menacing, or detached.  Instead , he looked like he had bad lower back pain, and piles.  

"Just one more time for the record, Mrs Corday," said the woman across the table from her. "If you wouldn't mind."

Elizabeth reminded herself there was a time and a place to make sure strangers called her _Dr_ Corday. She forced a smile. "Not at all," she lied.

"Rachel - my step-daughter - had come to stay for a few days."

_"Of course you can come and see Ella. She is your sister."_

"There was a history of friction between you."

"In the past, yes", said Elizabeth. "But we reconciled when Mark - my husband, her father - died.  We were both there when it happened."

_"If you carry on like this, you will lose the little time you have together and you will spend the rest of your life regretting the lost opportunity." _

"I'm sorry", said Detective Opposite, politely. 

"It was about drugs", pointed out  Detective Wall.  "The friction."

Elizabeth had known that was coming. "Yes," she said. "It was. Rachel had been dabbling with Ecstasy -"

_"What has she taken? What's the matter with her? Rachel, what has she taken?"_

"And my daughter found some of her tablets and ate them."

_"I … I have a baby … with an amphetamine overdose … come quickly … a baby with an amphetamine overdose. Two - two and a half tablets …"_

"Must have been terrifying for you", said Detective Opposite.  

"Yes. As a mother, and as a doctor. When you really, really know what that can do to a baby … terrifying."

"So terrifying you threw her out," said Detective Wall, noncommittally. 

"No, I left", said Elizabeth. She turned her head to look directly at Detective Wall. Slipped disc inside five years, she reckoned. "Temporarily.  With Ella. At the time, I was out of my mind. Mark promised me he would speak to Rachel, sort her out. We talked about family therapy.  Only we never got the chance."

"You didn't throw her out." 

"I would never throw Rachel out."

_"Either she's gone when I bring this baby home, or I'm not bringing this baby home!!"_

"But your marriage broke down because of her." pounced Detective Opposite.

"We had a - a bad patch", admitted Elizabeth, swallowing her pride. "It was hard. But we came through it." Her lip quivered. "For what little time we had left."

"Let me see if I understand this", continued the overweight woman in the cheap suit opposite her. Too many donuts, noted Elizabeth, she really should watch that.  And buy a bra with proper underwiring while she's at it.  "Your own baby accidentally overdoses on  your step-daughter's Ecstasy and you allow your step-daughter back into the house." 

"Jen - Rachel's mother - told me she's clean now. Was."

"Not many step-mothers would have taken that risk", said Detective Opposite, with a far-away look in her eye as if she was trying to calculate if any real mothers would have taken that risk, ever.

"I … well, this may sound silly, but I felt I owed it to Mark." The detectives' faces revealed that this did, in fact, sound monumentally silly. Elizabeth continued. "And … as a doctor, I know something about rehab, and … well, Rachel said she wanted to make amends. And … dammit, she's only a child herself.  She isn't sixteen yet. She made one mistake. A big mistake, a stupid and dangerous mistake … but it was only one. And she said she was truly, truly sorry."

"And you believed her", said Detective Wall, looking over her head to where a window would have been if the  architects hadn't decided that  the Dungeon Look was more conducive to browbeating suspects.  His tone of polite scepticism almost infuriated Elizabeth Corday.

"Yes," said Elizabeth.

"Really", murmured Detective Opposite.

"Yes, I really believed her," said Elizabeth  sharply. She took a deep breath to compose herself.  "When we were in Hawaii, before Mark - while Mark was still alive, I could see the progress  Rachel had made, and I started to trust her again. We weren't there yet, but it was a start. There was - hope."

_"Do you really think it's wise leaving her with that boy? He must be seventeen. Have you seen the way he's looking at her?" _

_As any man would at a sixteen year old in a string bikini, who could pass for a virgin. _

_Mark had chuckled, tickled Ella's chin, and said, "She'll be fine"_

"OK", said Detective Wall, drawing a line under that part of the conversation for now. "Take us back to last night."

"I'd been working at the hospital. My shift should have finished at 7pm. I'd started at 7 that morning. At about half-past six - the OR notes can confirm the exact time - the ER sent up a patient who'd been in an MVA. He had internal bleeding -"

"That was your friend Dr Weaver's patient?" asked Wall.

_"I hope you end up with a possibly fatal disease some day Kerry, so that I can do absolutely nothing to help you!"_

"Yes," said Elizabeth, pleasantly.  "Internal bleeding from a lacerated liver. It wasn't a quick operation. They never are. I left my resident to close up, just before 11 pm. The notes can give you the exact time.  I scrubbed out, changed, collected Ella from Daycare, and drove home about quarter past. It was about quarter to twelve when I got in." 

_Most of the house was dark. From the foot of the stairs she could just see a dim pool of light from the spare room where she'd put Rachel._

"So I locked up behind me, just dropped my coat and my briefcase, and took Ella up to bed.  She was already fast asleep, so I undressed her, tucked her in and went to bed myself." 

"Your room's at the front of the house, and Ella's is at the back," said Opposite.

Elizabeth sipped some water, and nodded. 

"Did you check on Rachel?" she asked.

Elizabeth snorted. "She's a teenager. I remember being sixteen, and let me tell you I would not have appreciated my mother checking up on me when she got home from work and I was in bed."  Elizabeth did not mention boarding school, or that it had been different with her father.  When her father came home after midnight, she would have sulked for days if he had not crept in to give her a good night kiss as she pretended to sleep. 

"Then what happened?"

_Elizabeth opened the door to the spare room to tell Rachel to turn off the lights, and saw her lying zonked on the bed, wearing headphones, with her cell phone nearby._

"I went straight to bed myself."

"You're sure you didn't check on Rachel."

_Elizabeth shook the girl's shoulder. No response. She shook her again, harder, and realised Rachel was stoned. Truly, madly, deeply stoned._ _On what?, wondered Elizabeth.  The room didn't smell of dope, Rachel didn't smell of booze, and she couldn't see one of those dreaded Ziplocs anywhere._

"Yes, I'm sure. I had no reason to," said Elizabeth, making sure she addressed both Wall and Opposite.  "I thought she was asleep."  She paused a moment, and drank some more water. "Of course, I wish I had now. But last night … I thought everything was alright." 

_Elizabeth stepped back from the bed, and looked around for some clue as to what Rachel could have taken. Down on the floor, she saw a bottle, picked it up and saw it had contained Vicodin. Mark's Vicodin_.  

_Her hand started to shake so much she nearly dropped the bottle._

_When she managed to open it, she saw that it was empty. Elizabeth realised she had no way of knowing how many Rachel could have taken. She could not remember how many had been left when Mark died, or how many Rachel had taken in the eighteen months since she'd seen her.  Elizabeth guessed that Rachel could have taken as many as twenty-five in one go, or as few as two. _

_She bent over and checked Rachel's vitals. _

"Did you hear anything during the night? Anything suspicious?" asked Opposite, in a tone of voice that conveyed, "like, oh, I don't know, your step-daughter choking to death on her own vomit, or something."

"No," said Elizabeth. 

"Nothing at all?"  This time with the subtext, "Rachel Greene died not twenty feet from your head and you slept through it."

Elizabeth shook her head. "I was so tired … I was out like a light the moment my head hit the pillow. I didn't hear a thing until the alarm clock at 6 am this morning." She looked, and felt, ashamed. 

"You heard that ok," said Wall, easily. 

Elizabeth nodded. "Conditioning. And I slept well. Not long, but well. You learn how to do that in my job." 

Wall and Opposite noticed that she sounded vaguely bitter about that, and empathised. They were careful not to show it. 

"Go on", said Opposite.

_She'd stared down at Rachel lying blissed out on the bed in the spare room, and not in the recovery position. Even in this dim light, Elizabeth could see nothing of Mark in Rachel. Elizabeth thought of Ella, down the hall, under the moon and stars mobile her mother had sent her, dreaming fat childish dreams of puppies and ice cream and happy ever after. _

_She weighed the empty Vicodin bottle in her hand._

_How many would be enough?_

"I picked Ella up. She was already waking, a bit fussy. She's not a morning sort of kid. When we came out of the bathroom, the door to Rachel's bedroom was still shut. I yelled at her, but there was no reply."

_Elizabeth dropped the Vicodin bottle carefully, so it rolled to more or less where she had found it.  _

_She'd know in the morning._

_She shut the door to the spare room behind her quietly, so as not to wake Ella._

"I took Ella downstairs to start breakfast, and yelled up to Rachel to get cracking. She didn't, so … so I went upstairs and entered her room. That's where I found her."

Elizabeth picked up the plastic cup of water, but stared into it instead of drinking. "I saw she'd vom - well, I could see what had happened.  I checked her vitals, cleared an airway, called an ambulance."

"She was breathing?" asked Opposite, thrown off balance.

Elizabeth shook her head. "No resps, no pulse." She set down the plastic cup. "She was already cold."

"But you cleared her airway," said Wall, who wanted to get things clear.  

"And CPR. It's standard procedure. Like calling the ambulance. Anybody else, brought in to me like that at County, I'd have pronounced them on the spot.  One of the paramedics worked on her on the way over to Mt Sinai, but you could see it was hopeless."

Wall and Opposite communed briefly, without speaking. Then, "Thank you, Mrs Corday," said Wall. "You've been most helpful."

"We appreciate you talking to us at such a painful time," said Opposite. "If you give Rachel's mother's contact details to the sergeant down the hall, he can take it from there."

"Thank you," said Elizabeth, "thank you."  She stood up, not altogether steadily, which could easily be blamed on the chair, and walked out.

"She's on the level,"  said Wall, unnecessarily. Opposite gave her formal agreement. Wall sat down in Elizabeth's chair, gingerly.  The high fibre diet was not working. He'd have preferred to lean on the table, but he was all too aware of the damage that did to his pants. Opposite pulled her notes together.

"Poor woman," she said.

"Yeah, I wouldn't want to be in Fred's shoes making that call."

"God yeah, poor Mrs Greene too. But can you imagine?  Finding your step-daughter dead like that, just when you thought she'd turned the corner. Imagine knowing that if you'd only walked in on the kid earlier, you could have saved her. How do you live with that?" 

Elizabeth Corday handed over Jen Greene's details to the sergeant at the desk and walked straight out of the precinct. She made it round the corner out of sight before she threw up in the gutter. 

A man out walking his dog was horrified to see the precinct turn out a drunken hooker so early in the morning. 

Elizabeth wiped her mouth, flashed the dog-walker a V-sign, squared her shoulders, and walked back into the precinct.

When she came out the second time, she was carrying Ella and walked straight into the sunlight without a backward glance. 

==============


End file.
